The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations

EP 182: How to Automate Your Interview Process and Maintain Strong Candidate Engagement

• James Mackey: Recruiting, Talent Acquisition, Hiring, SaaS, Tech, Startups, growth-stage, RPO, James Mackey, Diversity and Inclusion, HR, Human Resources, business, Retention Strategies, Onboarding Process, Recruitment Metrics, Job Boards, Social Media Re

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Heather Lother, VP of Talent & People Operations at Crossover for Work, talks about how focusing on skills and transparency can completely change the way teams hire. She shares what she’s learned from coaching managers through choosing candidates, making interviews more meaningful, and turning the process into a genuine two-way conversation.


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SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for tuning in, everyone. We got Heather Lothar on the show today. Heather is currently the vice president of talent and people operations at Crossover for Work. Heather, I'm really excited about the conversation we're going to have today.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, James. I really appreciate it. So happy to get to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, we're really excited for you to be here as well. Just to kick us off, where did you uh grow up?

SPEAKER_01:

A little bit of everywhere. Um, military brat. And then my dad got out of the military and went into aviation, which I always say is worse than being in the military, because at least in the military, you're only going to move every two years or so. When you work private aviation, you kind of move every six to 18 months, depending on what's going on with the economy. So most of my childhood was spent in the southeast, but by the time I was 12, I had lived in eight different states and 10 different houses by 12. Yeah. So wow.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that is even more than military families. That's quite a unique experience. I don't know if I've ever heard that before. That's a lot of moving around.

SPEAKER_01:

It was. I got really good at packing and unpacking, um, and also really good at being the new kid in class.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like socially, I'm sure that has a big impact in how you develop. And I'm sure that there are benefits and how you bring that forward to being in such a people-oriented business, right?

SPEAKER_01:

You know, I actually attribute that to some of my success in this role because one of the things I had to learn really early on was how to just make friends with anyone. And the easiest way to do that is to find a point of commonality. And honestly, as diverse and varied as the world is, there's almost always something that I can find to connect with on a personal level with whoever I'm talking to these days.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Sure. So what uh what was the favorite place or favorite places that you lived?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I would say best food, Memphis, Tennessee. Hands down.

SPEAKER_00:

Really?

SPEAKER_01:

A barbecue, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I never knew that was a big food city. Is it is it well known as a food city?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Just dry rub, uh dry rub, Memphis ribs. Uh head down the dark stairwell at rendezvous, um, and you'll be in good company there. But probably favorite place in terms of where I put down roots would be here in South Carolina. This is where I chose to stay for college and chose to raise my family. So this has been home for me for long enough that I'm almost considered a local. And if you're from the Southeast, you'll know it takes a long time to get local status.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. What what part of South Carolina?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, so I'm on the western side of the state in Greenville.

SPEAKER_00:

Greenville. Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01:

What's the closest big city to Greenville or city that I'm um so we're an hour and a half from Charlotte, North Carolina. We're an hour and a half from Columbia, South Carolina. We're two and a half hours from Atlanta.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, got it. Nice, nice. So you went to school out there?

SPEAKER_01:

I did, yeah. I went to college um here in Greenville at Furman. Just fell in love with the area. We actually moved here in high school, so I kind of stayed around. I had a much younger sister and felt like I needed to be close enough to watch her grow up. She was only in third grade when I went to college. I didn't want to miss all of that. I'm just stuck around ever since. It's been a really awesome place to grow up and raise a family myself.

SPEAKER_00:

I love it. And um, I'm curious to just learn more. Like what kind of interest did you have around the time you're going to college, or what were some of those kind of like formative experiences uh that you had or things that you were into at the time?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, do you remember the opening scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle's walking through town with her nose in a book? That was me. Growing up, if I didn't have a book with me, then something was wrong. In fact, my punishment as a kid was to have my book taken away instead of time out or being grounded because that was the only thing I cared about. Just absolutely an avid reader of anything and everything I could get my hands on. Um, and then really enjoyed a lot of work that I did with younger kids growing up. So I did a lot of like babysitting and tutoring and working at different camps and things. And that really kind of shaped where I thought I was gonna do with my life. So I think like a lot of us, I grew up and the career advice was do the thing you love. Because then what was the old adage? You know, if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Well, okay, I loved reading, and mostly I left school because it was it's a lot of reading. Um, and when it's not reading, it's fairly competitive test taking, which I also enjoyed. And so I was like, well, I guess that's it. I guess I have to go be a teacher. So that was when I went to college to study. I went to college to be actually an English teacher, did a tour of a high school and was like absolutely not. It was easily 10 times the size of the high school I went to. And the students were literally walking on their desks across the classroom, ignoring their first year teacher. And I was like, I look younger than that teacher does. And I'm smaller and less intimidating. I don't take it a chance in high school. So I switched to elementary education. That's what my bachelor's is in.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that's great. That's really cool. So when you graduated school, you actually, and you got your master's too, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

I did. I went back and got my master's um almost actually they're almost exactly 10 years apart um graduation dates. Yeah. Nice. Wrapped up my master's 4th of July 2020. So in the middle of COVID, that was insanity.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I bet. I bet. Um okay, cool. So coming out of college, uh, that's a pretty cool that you had the foundation of having people in your life that were telling you to do what you love. Um, because I I am a big believer in following your passion uh in education and throughout life, because if you're passionate, you're ultimately going to work really hard, you're gonna be emotionally engaged, and it's going to lead to opportunities, right? Versus if you're trying to live somebody else's vision that isn't compatible, congruent with who we are, then it's it's hard to execute surely off of like willpower and discipline long term. Like I don't care how motivated you are, it's draining if there isn't some level of like passion and emotional engagement. So I I came from the camp. A lot of the folks that I heard from grow up around were, you know, you got to get the finance degree or the engineering degree, or my my favorite topic growing up was philosophy. Like I loved, you know, that was but that was like, oh, there's no, you know, that you don't get the degree in philosophy. You don't do those types of things. And um I'm curious, so who were those influences? Was that did that come from family or from teachers that you had?

SPEAKER_01:

I would say primarily my parents. Um yeah. So my parents just were really, really big on the importance of education, which I completely get now. Looking back at things, you know, my dad was the baby of the family, and he and all of his older brothers got to go to college purely because of the GI Bill. Um, so they all signed up for military service. That was what paid for them to go to college. Otherwise, that was not in the cards for them. My mom opted to do the stay-at-home route, but when I was probably my junior year of college, she went back to school and earned an associate and then a bachelor's and then a master's, just tick, tick, tick right on through. Um, she raised three kids and she had put so much effort into our education. It was really inspiring to see her go back and actually like go chase her dreams to see that there's not a time frame for that. There's not like an expiration date on going back to school and getting the she needed degrees and she needed licensure to do what she wants to do. She's a um a therapist. And so there's not a timeline on that. And I I really appreciated having that influence in my life. And then I'd say, you know, like my grandparents worked, my grandfather was a pharmacist, my grandmother was a nurse, and they worked super, super hard their whole life and just really instilled into us that that was something they enjoyed. They did it because they liked it. My grandfather retired and went back to work. He actually retired from Dow Jones chemical, then went and became a pharmacist at Walmart because he was bored. Uh he was like, I can't just sit home. This is this is silly. So I think to me, like working hard and doing something that you love enough to want to do it, even when you have other options, was always something that was instilled in me from a very early age.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I'm sure that's impacted too. It's maybe even how you think about finding like the right fit, like when you're evaluating candidates and like their strengths and helping place them in the right roles. Like I think at least that's something that I I think a lot about now, probably even more than when I had less leadership experience is really dialing into understanding the team well enough and working with people closely enough to identify their strengths, not just what you perceive as their strengths, but maybe you see something and someone is a strength, but they don't, or it's still not ultimately a passion or an interest for them to follow. And sometimes you have a great person, but they're not necessarily in the right seat. And that kind of mindset, too, I think also translates into how we build teams. It doesn't just stop at education, it doesn't just stop with our own careers, but we think about other people growing and getting the most out of a team dynamic. I feel like that's really relevant as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think especially my experience watching my mom go back to school really reframes how I think about both career gaps and transferable skills, because I know from where I sit professionally that had she not been going into therapy, if she'd been going into, I don't know, some business role, that a lot of people would have looked at her resume and been like, I don't, this uh this doesn't tell the story that I expect to hear. But knowing her and seeing the perseverance that she put into things and just the way that she could adapt and learn new things, I've always tried to kind of stop and assess what story am I bringing to this resume or to this candidate that is rooted in an assumption and that may not actually reflect their capabilities or their skills. What is it they left off the resume that I should be asking about? Um, because a lot of people will get intimidated to put things on there because they think, you know, people in the corporate world won't see the value in that. But I think we should be and often are from the people I talk to every day. Like we're often the best people to say, oh my gosh, like yes, that's a skill. You should highlight that. I know it it probably goes against the career advisor's advice or the resume writer that you hired, but I see the value in that. And I think you should really highlight that when you talk to a hiring manager or you talk to a hiring team.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And how did you end up getting into recruiting?

SPEAKER_01:

Like most people, accidentally. I have yet to meet very many people who did this intentionally and said that's what I want to do with my life. I actually started my career in the middle of the Great Recession working for nonprofits. And so I worked with kids who were in foster care. From there, I transitioned into doing nonprofit volunteer management. And I am such like a nerd. So I got a job at a children's museum. They said, Hey, you seem like you're not intimidated by middle schoolers. Why don't you run our middle school volunteer and leadership development program? And I was like, Cool, let's go. Middle schoolers are awesome. They laugh at all my jokes. They're amazing. So I threw myself in to research and professional development. I signed up for every webinar I could get my hands on. I signed up for every newsletter, every book, like anything I could to learn about this thing called volunteer management. And what I discovered is that it's recruiting, but for unpaid roles. And I was like, oh, that totally makes sense. Because instead of a paycheck to offer people, now I need to offer them a meaningful experience, a sense that they have added value to something, and a sense that they've learned and grown as a result of spending their time here without compensation. Done. Let's do this. And so I dove into it. I was asked pretty quickly to take on adult volunteer management. And then I circuitously wound my way to a local United Way where I oversaw the entire volunteer engagement team. It was um a very kind of roundabout loop. But along the way, I really tried to pull from all these other areas of practice and bring those best practices into my work managing volunteers. And then I landed here at Crossover, which is a story all of its own, one maybe about the potential pitfalls and perils of keyword matching, but also a true testament to skills-based hiring along the way, too.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice, nice. Yeah, that's a really interesting start to recruiting working on volunteer roles that are unpaid because the focus on value and experience comes first, which it should be for paid positions as well, right? I mean, if you think about it, we should for top talent, right? For a lot of the candidates that we want to recruit to our organizations, like you know, they're gonna have multiple options. And so being able to tell that story to really understand their needs and what they're looking for and to translate that into uh a good story highlighting the most relevant points for them and being able to show that compelling future is something that differentiates recruiters, right? And recruiting organizations, right? Um so that that sounds like a pretty special foundation. Like it's different. It's different than the way that most of us start out. It's not a traditional in-house or agency recruiting job.

SPEAKER_01:

No, it was really interesting. But I think when you apply that lens, I'm thinking about like the talent wars, right? And there was just this big article that came out in the last week about Microsoft poaching open AI people, and open AI is talking about like our compensation packages are so great and amazing. But when you really stop and talk to top performers and when you talk to Gen Z, Gen Alpha candidates, they don't give a crap about your compensation package. If your culture is bad, if your candidate experience is bad, if there's not a promise for growth and development and learning, if there's not a clear path for them, it really almost doesn't matter what number you put on the paper. A lot of those folks are just not as motivated by that as they maybe once were. But I also think it's because we're coming into an era where people say 40 hours, often 50, depending on where you work and when you add in commute, um, is a pretty significant chunk of my life every week. I don't want to spend it miserable. I'm not willing to be my grandparents or my parents have a heart attack at 40 because of the stress of a job that doesn't care if I show up on Monday. So I think that value proposition has shifted a lot, especially in American corporate culture. Companies don't take care of employees the way maybe our mythology says they used to. I'm still not totally convinced that's historically accurate, but we definitely have built this myth around the corporate family that takes care of their employees. That just doesn't exist in most places anymore. So I think people are looking for more than just a great compensation package. And that starts with us on the talent acquisition side. That starts with the story we tell about the role and its contribution and why it matters. And it starts with candidate experience from that very first touch point, whether that's a website or an email or a you know, cold call, it's that starts the ball rolling. And if we're not delivering excellent candidate experience, then we're probably inadvertently setting ourselves up for some preventable early candidate exits or offer declines that we probably could have worked our way around had we planned ahead a little bit better.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. So you were working for a United Way and you were there for several years, and then in in around May 2021, you went over to Crossover for work. How did that come about?

SPEAKER_01:

Crossover was expanding their team. They were just sort of building this repeatable hiring machine, if you will, that focused on skills and was going to completely reshape how the organization hired. And they were looking to add some talent to the team. They candidly were looking for engagement managers from McKenzie or Bain, et cetera, right? Well, they advertise the job as engagement manager on LinkedIn. How does LinkedIn serve you jobs? I don't know if everybody most recruiters know this, right? It looks at your current title. Well, my current title was VP of engagement. So it handed me this job out. And I was like, well, that's cool. The first line um I remember of the job description was something like if you think hiring today is like a horse and buggy and you're ready to actually build a Tesla, you should apply. And I was like, done. Um hiring today sucks. It was not as bad five years ago as it is now. I think it's worse now from both candidate and recruiter perspectives, just because of volume. But I was super frustrated with hiring. I had gotten my master's almost nine months earlier, had been trying to get just an entry-level HR job. I'll just, I'll do anything in HR. I'll be an HR specialist, I'll be a generalist, I'll run payroll. Like, I don't care. I just want to put my master's and HR to work. I don't mind taking a bunch of steps down the ladder. I reported to the CEO at that point. I was like, I seniority doesn't mean anything to me. Like, I'm not looking to be a leader. I just want to use this degree that I went out and got. And I just could not even get like the first callback. I was so frustrated because, of course, there's a ton of talent in that field. And you don't have to take the entry-level candidate because you have people with five, six, seven years of experience willing to take specialist roles and entry-level positions ostensibly. So um I saw the crossover ad and I was like, okay, let's do this. I hit apply and it completely threw me because the first thing it asked was, hey, here's some like yes, no questions to make sure you actually meet the requirement for the role. And I was like, okay, that's different. So I answered a couple of questions and they were like, hey, here's a 15-minute cognitive aptitude test. If you're smart enough to pass this, then we'll tell you more about the job. And I was like, all right, competitive level unlocked, let's do this. I remember I was actually at my parents' house with my son at the time. And I was like, I need to be quiet for 15 minutes. Okay. I have to like do some math. And they were like, What is she talking about? But I passed it. And so I was like, all right, let's go. Game on. What's next? And the next piece was saying, Hey, look, nobody does exactly what we do out there in the world. So right Rather than say, have you done this before? Because you won't. We're going to give you a piece of a puzzle that's a puzzle we solve all the time in a lot of different contexts. We want you to solve it to the best of your ability. And it was like unraveling a funnel. Like, what was wrong with this hiring funnel? And what did it mean? And what was the right way to fix it? And they gave you some context and they gave me some data. And I spent way too long on it because I got lost in the fun of it. And that was like revolutionary for me. I was like, I'm enjoying an application process. When's the last time that happened? That I like applied to a job. They asked me to do homework, which ew, and I liked it. And I was like, all right, well, now I'm hooked. Um, I want this job. Um, and I told my husband texted my husband, I said, I applied for this job and I'm scared because I actually want it way more than I should at this point.

SPEAKER_00:

Have you spoken to anybody yet? Or was this all like no?

SPEAKER_01:

Nope. So at crossover, you don't talk to anybody until you get to the interview. The interview is the last stage in the process. But we give you this little timeline that tells you what you have to do to earn the interview. But when you earn the interview, you've already proven you can do the job. And so we send out offers. The data was a little bit different back then because we didn't hire at scale the way we do now. But today we send out offers to probably over 50% of people who land a first-round interview.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, this is cool. Yeah. All right. This goes against a lot of conventional wisdom, I think, and the industry. Um, there's a concern, particularly with AI, about the overuse of automation and losing human touch and putting too much testing top of funnel, not resonating with folks and missing out on top talent, which I I question that assumption. I think it's well, first off, I think hiring is incredibly situational to each business and the type of talent, not only roles but culture uh that you're looking to build. So, first off, no strategy needs to appeal to everyone, they have to appeal to the right people. So there's that, but still, this is unusual. Like, I and so I'm curious.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'll be the first person to tell you like if we were hiring truck drivers, this would not be what we did.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

So if I was hiring call service, you know, like call center staff, we would do this differently. But we're hiring primarily white-collar tech workers, like engineers, sleeper remote roles. So engineer product, marketing, finance, sales, but we also do ed tech. So we have like curriculum designers, enrollment, admissions, um, some other roles like that. But okay, mostly remote roles, mostly knowledge worker type positions.

SPEAKER_00:

And are these W-2s or contract, shorter-term contracts or what we support all types of hiring.

SPEAKER_01:

So most of our hiring um in the US is for W-2 employees. We also hire remote contractors around the world, and we also hire short-term contractors both inside and outside the US as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, cool. So clearly the way that you're executing this strategy is you're doing it in an effective way, right? It's working at scale. For I feel like this success story, there's probably a hundred where companies that use too much automation at toward the top of the funnel, too much testing without engagement, engaging that doesn't work. What do you think makes how you do things at crossover different and effective?

SPEAKER_01:

So I think number one is we have a big candidate pool. And we will tell you it takes a lot of at bats for us to win. So we need a lot of applicants in order to have the kind of funnels that we need to deliver successful candidates. So if your candidate pool is like 37 people, this doesn't work, right? Because those 37 people know they're one of 37 people in the world with this specific background. That's not our case. And so we're fortunate in that regard. But I think the other thing that works is we're super transparent. So the minute you hit apply, you get a dashboard. And it shows you every single step you need to take and it shows you where the interview happens in this process. It is not a secret. We don't hide it. We tell you how much time each step is going to take. Okay, so this thing's gonna take you 15 minutes. This thing's probably 20. This thing might be an hour and a half. Um, so you decide when you start it, you decide what you're willing to tolerate. And if you bow out, you bow out. No harm, no foul. You're still eligible to reapply. We don't like blacklist people who quit things. That's ridiculous. Um, but we're very transparent about that. And I think that helps. The second thing is I think there's a lot of people like me out out there in the world. People who are competitive, who like a challenge, and who relish the idea of being able to prove that they can do the job because maybe their resume is not perfect. Maybe they don't have the pedigree that other candidates do. And they know that, and they know that's why they're missing out on some jobs. And so a process that very transparently says, don't tell us you can do the job, show us you can do the job appeals to a lot of people. The other thing is we're super transparent about pay. That's obviously not the sole motivator, like we talked about earlier. But if you don't tell people what the job is going to deliver to them, at least financially, it's really hard to justify any investment on a candidate side. Like if you had not told me the salary, I guarantee you I would not have completed that application process.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. So it sounds like thus far what we've covered, the primary ways that you've been able to have high engagement with this uh approach is one, as soon as they apply, they're given a summary of the entire process. So there's a high level of transparency. And of course, it's highly responsive since it's automated. So as soon as they click apply, they're getting access to what's going to be expected of them. It sounds like to some extent it's how you position the job description, being transparent with the compensation. There we go. Like what what else is it? If you had to like pick the the top ways that you get people excited to stick in there. You also mentioned the competitive nature. So we we hit on a few things, but is there anything else, or like what do you think are the top reasons people really go through with this?

SPEAKER_01:

So the candidates I talk to by and large tell me that they found it to be a fun challenge. So we do whenever we can. We can't always gamify it in the sense of like play digital monopoly and see if you win the job. But like when we can make something a simulation, when we can say, here's an example of an email you might get, how would you respond? It shifts things from what's my portfolio of work to, huh, okay, this is kind of like a game. How would I handle this in real life? So that's one thing that I hear a lot from candidates is they found it interesting and fun and challenging. And that challenge in and of itself was motivational for them. The other thing that we do is we invest a lot of effort into our email and automated pop-up reminders. So we have videos that show up on the platform that are like, hey, this is what you're about to do. Here's why. We do a lot of, you know, Simon Cetic, start with why. We do a lot of tying things back to the purpose. We are also very transparent about how we evaluate different assessments or simulations. So we'll say, like, here's the things we're evaluating. Here's what we don't care about. You know, don't care about this, this, and this. And so we kind of take some things out of being a gray zone for candidates who feel like hiring is a black box already and try to put it back in their hands where we say, like, look, we're giving you the rubric here. Like before you hit submit, go through a rubric. Check and see if you think you meet the standard. If you don't, go re-record it or resubmit it or make an edit, whatever it is. And then we do a lot of email campaigns as well for candidates who are in the funnel. You know, very informational, educational, tying it back to the mission, helping them understand that, you know, these roles are competitive and the assessments help us make their interview more effective and help us increase the likelihood that anyone who interviews gets a job. Because that's really the end goal for us is to make the pipeline so effective that by the time you get to the interview, we're just selling you on the position. We're convincing you to take the job by the time we interview you. That's our gold star goal. We're not there across the board. That requires a lot of hiring manager education, but it definitely is part of where we aim every single role.

SPEAKER_00:

I think we're listening to you talk through this, it's really fascinating because I think where companies probably fail when they've tried this approach, or why a lot of people may think, oh, this doesn't work, or recruiters would say it's not feasible because people aren't going to stay engaged, or we're not gonna get top people. This approach isn't about doing less work. It's not like a shortcut. You're doing the work in a different way. You're putting a lot more effort into how you position the company and the role and putting together resources and guides and the transparency aspects of it, probably the job description, your website, your explaining the why, the email follow-ups. So it's it's not like you're doing you're just automating and it's you're doing a lot to invest in the candidate experience. And so if somebody were to try to implement this strategy without making a huge investment in the candidate experience, then it wouldn't work. As you start to explain it more and more, and I start to see like everything that goes into making this happen, it's really just a shift in an approach. But it's sure as heck, it's not like a shortcut. There's a lot of work that needs to go into making it a great experience so that people actually maintain their interest in the interview process.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. The other thing we try to do, and we can't do it with every assessment, but the ones where we can, we absolutely do. We try to think in terms of how does this assessment add value for the candidate? So, yes, we're getting to see something the candidate is capable of doing, but are we giving them information that is behind the scenes? Are we giving them stuff that you wouldn't normally get until your post-offer team call with your colleagues, things like FAQs, documents about how we do things, playbooks, even. We'll embed those in the assessments and say this is part of the DNA of the team that you're joining. If you don't like this kind of work, you probably should stop your application now because this is very literally the playbook from the team you're trying to be part of. If you love it, if you read it and go, finally, about time, great, here's what the assignment is. Take the playbook, apply it to the scenario, show us what happens when you do that. So we're trying to also take some of those really late stage conversations and artifacts, documents, knowledge that often doesn't get shared until after the company has made a commitment to a candidate and move them way earlier in the process as a way of helping candidates self-select in or out as appropriate to the team and the role that they're applying for.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think regardless of how a company structures the interview process, when there is a lot of transparency and experience is top of mind, they can tell and it builds trust quickly. So maybe another thing that this conversation is making me think about is experience, regardless of how you decide to do it, whether it's like first round you're doing manual setup of screens and interviewing everyone at the top of the funnel, or you're using more of this, the path that your team is. Either way, it's investing heavily in experience because experience is gonna be what builds trust. And when you have trust, then you can go into a conversation and have a different dynamic with that individual. Again, I could see another rebuttal, right? Be well, wait, if you only talk them at the end of the process, then are they gonna know you well enough to try to accept an offer? And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, if you've invested in the experience and providing a lot of transparency and they feel like it's a predictable and you're following through on what you're saying, and they're not left wondering or anxious about next steps or anything like that, then you have built trust in maybe a slightly less traditional way. You build trust. So I I think it's really interesting. Kudos to you guys for figuring this out because I again I feel like I've I've seen this flop so many times for companies and they weren't doing all the things you guys are doing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's tricky to get right, and we don't always get it right. There's plenty of times when we fall flat on our face, or we get a role and we tell a hiring manager, like, you don't know enough about what you want for us to design a funnel. And so best we can do is put a job description out there and do a little light filtering, and then you're just gonna have to interview a ton of people. I will say that pretty quickly gets hiring managers on board when in week one they're like, why do I have 15 interviews? And I'm like, well, remember that conversation about like you don't really know a lot about what you want or what they're supposed to be doing day to day, and you kind of have this nebulous idea that they're gonna make the business better. This is what happens when that's your entire hiring criteria. Um, have fun. Call me when you have some thoughts about who's a good fit or not and why. And we'll build that into the process. But we're also super iterative too. So when we flop, we generally have a plan for fixing things within five to seven days.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's I think the difference between a good team and a great team is a great team when something doesn't go to plan, they fix it quickly. That's like particularly our line of work on my company RPO solution side, that's what I always say. It's like, you know, we we usually get it right the first time. But if we don't, we fix it and we'll know about the problem before you do, and we'll already be implementing a solution before you even are aware of anything, and you're not gonna feel any impact to performance. And I think that's what allows us to stand out with our customers. To me, that's the difference between a great team and a good team. Like I I think you also so now you're in a role where you do have a lot of exposure to different hiring managers. You see the challenges they have with hiring, and you see some of the blockers, like things that are getting in the way of them being successful. And I'm wondering, we could talk about process improvements and these types of things, but this is a people business, and sometimes there are psychological blockers, right?

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'm just wondering like, what do you see the hiring leaders that you work with struggle with what they can be working on to get better results?

SPEAKER_01:

So a couple of things. The first is we ask hiring managers to adopt a completely different mental mindset for hiring, right? And so if you've been a hiring manager elsewhere and you come into our company and now you need to hire, we're basically telling you kind of forget everything you've ever done about hiring, and now you have to do it our way. So we do a lot of education and training, and I almost call it like evangelism about this internally. Like, here's why it's better, I promise. Trying to just help them overcome some things that don't fit our model. You know, saying, oh, they used to work at XYZ as a proxy for XYZ runs a really rigorous recruitment process so I can trust them to have vetted candidates for me. I we talk all the time about like how that's kind of lazy. It's a mental heuristic that isn't really rooted in any actual data. It's just how you feel about the company. We do a lot of talk about, and this is maybe something that I didn't fully understand until I started hiring personally. We talk a lot about sort of the insecurities that hiring managers are sometimes really hesitant to fess up to. So I think back to the first time I was making a hiring decision at United Way. I was supposed to be hiring for the retired and senior volunteer program. It's a federal volunteer uh grant. And the part of the grant stipulated that the person that was hired to run the program could be anybody, but they had to know how to go out and recruit people ages 55 and up to be volunteers. So when you post a job like that, naturally your candidate pool kind of skews toward people who have a lot of experience with that particular demographic. And I had a super diverse candidate pool. I was down to two finalists. I had one person who was just super experienced, had run multiple government grants before, had run her own company, had a lot of experience, but had never recruited volunteers. And then I had somebody else who had recruited volunteers but had never recruited this demographic and had never worked on a government grant. And I went to my CEO and I said, help me make this decision. And she said, What are you stuck on? I said, Well, for starters, I'm like 26, 27 at this point. One of them is like easily my grandmother's age. And she's like, no nonsense, go get them. She's gonna be hard driving, type A. I said, she can do the job, but she's gonna be really hard for me to manage. I said, this other person, I'll have no problem managing. They're like my age, they're kind of inexperienced, they're gonna lean on me for expertise, they're gonna come to me for advice, but also they have no idea how to do the job. She was like, What do you think? I was like, I feel like I probably need to lean into being really uncomfortable managing someone who's my grandmother's age. She was like, that's probably the right choice there. But I think about that conversation a lot because when I work with hiring managers so often, when the choice comes down to two candidates, it's sometimes less about who can do do the job, and a lot of the time more about who do I feel like I can manage, who's going to be easier to get along with, who do I like more as if we're going to barbecues at each other's house every week? We're definitely not as a primarily remote company. That's not happening. So a lot of times I say, okay, let's take all of that out of it. If you disappeared for three weeks, which of these candidates can do the job without you here? Because that's the person you should hire. The person who's capable and doesn't need you to hold their hand every day is probably going to be harder to manage because they don't need you. They don't feel that I get to be expert. They want my opinion kind of need that sometimes managers have. And so we talk about that. I think there's also like psychological things about, you know, can I have Hire someone who's dramatically different from the rest of the team and they contribute and add strength to the team as opposed to make the team harder to work with. And so, especially as a global company, we don't talk as much about value or culture fit as we do about like culture ad or even sometimes like culture adaptability. Because a lot of times when you're hiring globally, what matters more is if people can adapt and thrive in your team's environment rather than if they bring with them certain experiences or cultures that that you've never seen before, because that actually might be exactly what you need.

SPEAKER_00:

It might be, right? It's like hiring for the gap, right? What skill set do we not have? Sometimes it's not a down-the-pipe skill set, sometimes it's a a mindset, right?

SPEAKER_01:

And sometimes it's just super simple stuff. Like, are they gonna recognize that they can't email that candidate on that day because that's a holiday? Because they're smart enough and work in a multicultural enough environment or have encountered this before, and they're gonna go, yeah, no, you're not getting an answer from them until Tuesday. It's fine, just sit tight. Sometimes it's really simple stuff like that, but sometimes it's way more nuanced where they're like, okay, look, I'm telling you, like this client is based in this country, and this is the norm there about like doing a skip level email and copying their boss. Here's why you should or should not do that. And I understand the difference and can help the team grow with some of those nuanced perspectives that come from bringing global experience to the team.

SPEAKER_00:

So I gotta ask you though, there are certainly a lot of times in which people do need to be open to this concept of a culture ad, working with folks that operate and think differently, maybe working with people that, again, not looking at it through the who would I be friends with lens, but who's gonna be an effective team member lens, which I 100% agree with. Do you ever see legitimate concerns in terms of a team thinking from a behavioral perspective that somebody isn't the right fit? And if so, how do you differentiate that from other times when they should appreciate and accept different behavioral fits or culture fits, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So for me, this comes back to radical transparency, right? You have to be really honest with yourself about your culture. And that means I have to be part of that conversation, right? It's not just enough for my hiring manager to be honest with herself about it. Like she has to convey that back to me. And I've got to know her well enough to point out the blind spots there. So we're big on there's no culture bait and switch. You don't promise high support if it's actually we shoved you off the diving board into the deep end with no flowies, right? Like that's not cool. You don't promise slow onboarding if actually what you mean by that is you started on Monday and by Thursday you're presenting to the CEO. That's not slow. We don't promise, you know, work family if really we're after this relentless pursuit of excellence. So we have to be radically transparent about our culture. But I think there are some times when there are some legitimate things, right? And what I view as my role is to help hiring teams tease those out. So for instance, I have a team that is heavy travel right now. And they're also the emergency contact for the like the entire organization when something goes wrong. You can't promise those people a lot of work-life balance, right? Like that's just not if you're the on-call contact every single weekend and every single holiday, there's not actually a lot of work-life balance. And we can't make that different functionally. You know, like you talk through the function of it, like, can you make that better? But if you can't, then what it comes down to is you need to tell people that. You need to be upfront about that, and you need to be realistic about why you personally are willing to tolerate something that maybe is a subpar, you know, work experience, some piece of it that doesn't actually light you up, but why you do it, what's bigger, what matters more to you. And I think for some teams, they have said things like, This person really wants the job, but when I listen to them talk, they're saying something in like every single sentence that is absolutely opposite to how we operate. They have all the right experience, they say all the right things, and then immediately after they say the exact wrong thing. And I'm like, I think that's a legitimate red flag. Like, you should listen to that. Um, if they're like, Yes, I love doing that, but also I hate it. You're like, maybe I think maybe you don't like it. You know, that's I love that, but that's also why I left my last job. That should give you pause. Uh so you know, trying to help people. Yeah, the consistency, but then also if you're talking about the culture on your team and their response, if you're saying, say, for instance, I talked to a team the other day and they were like, we are just like low bureaucracy, high ownership. Like, we don't care who gets the credit as long as it gets done. And new people have to be okay with that. They have to know like their name's not gonna go on the banner when the project gets shipped. So, like, okay, so I'm talking to a candidate and I mentioned that. And one candidate that I talked to that day was like, oh my gosh, I love that. I've always been a proponent of that on my teams, and somebody always wants credit and it always falls apart, and we've never been able to implement it. I talked to somebody else who goes, huh, okay, I like that. And I was like, Have you ever done that? And they're like, No. Would you be comfortable with your name not being on it? Probably. I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_00:

You can just get a sense there that there might be some friction.

SPEAKER_01:

There's there's enthusiastic consent to your culture, and then there's sort of like a I would tolerate your culture. And I think it's okay when a team is, you know, narrowing down a decision to two people to choose the one who enthusiastically leans into something that you don't have the power to change. If you've got the power to change it and they're mildly skeptical about it, I don't think that should disqualify them either.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So we've covered a lot of ground here. This is a really interesting conversation. I'm really grateful that we covered the topics we did thus far. I would love to shift the focus to the future and thinking about your goals over the next year or several years as a talent acquisition leader, right? And as somebody leading the charge, helping a lot of hiring managers hire, what breakthrough are you looking to achieve? Like based on, okay, now you're in this position, you're helping a lot of companies hire, you have a lot of experience. What does the next level look like for you?

SPEAKER_01:

That's a great question. So I my mind goes about seven different directions. So I think professionally, for me, right now at Crossover, a big thing that I want to focus on this year in 2026 is how do I help interviewers be better interviewers, right? Because most people will tell you that being an interviewer is actually really hard too, even though all you have to do is ask the questions. They have to be good questions, they have to be the right questions. You have to be listening well enough to ask the follow-up. And I find that the sort of deep listening and active listening is sort of a skill that hasn't been equally developed amongst all of our teams. So helping our interviewers be better interviewers and then helping them process that sort of gut feel data after an interview and say, what does that mean? Like, why do you feel that way? Because if we can get that out of their gut and onto paper, then we can help them make more objective decisions. I think personally I am in a really like discombobulating space of finding out that I actually really enjoy vibe coding and I don't know what to do with that information. Because I spent my entire life saying I'm not like I'm not your STEM girl, like I'm not math, science, engineering. That's not me. But actually, I love it. And I think that might be a real paradigm shift for like how I define myself moving forward and literally playing around with like lovable and glide and Google Sheets and App Scripts, trying to make a better ledger for our personal family finances because I'm so irritated with all the things that I could buy for tracking your money. And it just like it dawned on me over the holidays. I was like, I could probably build something better. And then I was like, who am I to say that? Like, I've never built anything in my life. Then I was like, but I could.

SPEAKER_02:

You could.

SPEAKER_01:

So now I have to deal with this whole paradigm shift. And also remember that's not who I am at work. And I can't just walk over to the engineering team and be like, this is what I need you to do, because I don't have no idea what their code looks like. And I should probably avoid pretending to be an expert when really all I do is sit over there and type out instructions to AI and it turns something pretty on the screen for me.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. Well, I mean, I I guess uh too, as you get more experience doing that, that could lead to building different AI agents for TA purposes and your tech stack there, which would be pretty cool. That seems like it would be congruent with your approach to the inbound approach to optimizing.

SPEAKER_01:

It is. I mean, we've built a lot of that stuff internally over the last, gosh, what year is it? So almost the last four years. And we've been doing a lot of that work internally, which is probably why I feel like it's not a stretch for me to do that personally, but also feels very weird to suddenly be taking that step outside of my professional life. But now we've built all sorts of AI tools and automations and workflows, and we're dipping our toe into some agency stuff. The issue for us with agentic stuff is that there's zero room for error. And with a lot of these tools, there's a certain margin of error that just has to be acceptable for it to go into production. We're kind of just playing around with stuff for our internal team use because then there's always a safety net if something fails and not anything that's like publicly deployed.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yeah, definitely. And there's also stages, I'd suppose, right, where it's testing it internally versus if you do want to publicly deploy it at some point, work out all the issues in-house, right?

SPEAKER_01:

We prefer we much prefer to be the guinea pigs.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Yeah. It's kind of a a unique advantage that agencies and solutions companies have in the space is they can actually test technology in-house before making recommendations to customers, right? Um we definitely do some of that as well, which has been really helpful. We're gonna be doing a lot of that actually in 2026. And so you mentioned too, related to your own growth, right? Helping folks being that leader in your company that's helping, like essentially training interviewers and training people to be as productive as possible and as good as possible at interviewing. How do you go about doing that, right? Because you're it's a pretty big organization, right? Like you how many recruiters does your team have?

SPEAKER_01:

We have four folks in we kind of call it people ops. And then we've got a team of three who sit on the back end doing our sourcing and candidate support. And then we've got a team of four on the marketing. So our marketing is the same size as our people ops, which tells you a lot about the value we place on candidate experience and messaging. And then we've got five now on product. So it's expanding.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's very lean for the size of your organization. That's impressive. And I I guess that's one of the if you can get it right and the strategy that you're implementing, like it's a very lean and efficient motion.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it is. And it really means that on the PeopleOps, our core, the pieces that we do every single day that adds value is actually our stakeholder communication. That's the place where we add tremendous value. Yes, we do deep dives and to pipelines, and yes, we build assessments, and yes, we troubleshoot things and we educate and train. But the number one thing we do is communicate with hiring teams and candidates and connect the dots. And so all that other stuff we do is the bits and bobs that are not automatable. And eventually some of that will shift, but it's also the value-based judgments, is really like the heart of what our team does. So it means that we actually get to spend our time focusing on like the most important work that we could be doing and playing around with and experimenting with new tools and technologies and testing things, which is pretty fun.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, this is awesome. I I really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing so much of your insight. Thank you. This was a unique conversation. We covered some ground here that I haven't covered before on the show, which is always exciting.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm so glad that I was able to do it. This has been a really fun conversation for me too. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, thank you.

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James Mackey

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